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Makkah uplift ordered as 251 hajis trampled dead

Hajj "great success" and stampede dead "met their fate": minister

AFP, Mina
Saudi Arabia's King Fahd has ordered "overall plans" to be drawn up to modernise the holy cities of Makkah and Medina after 251 pilgrims died in a stampede, official media reported Monday.
With the annual Hajj still underway, the ruler issued a royal decree covering a 20-ycar project to be undertaken by a body chaired by Municipal and Rural Affairs Minister
Mutaab bin Abdul Aziz, the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) said.
Makkah regional governor Abdul Majid bin Abdel Aziz, Medina regional governor Muqran bin Abdul Aziz and Hajj minister Iyad bin Amin Madani would sit on the committee which would "gradually put forward proposals" and could call on expertise from abroad as well as within thekingdom, Itsaid.
The body would benefit from a "special budget", the decree said without speci fyi ng any figure.
A total of 251 Muslim pilgrims were trampled to death or suffocated and about 240 injured on Sunday, the first of three days of the ritual stoning of "Satan” pillars marking the end of the pilgrimage to Makkah.
Fourteen pilgrimswcrekilledin a stampede last year during the first dayofthesame ritual and 35 in 2001, while in 1998 118 were killed and more than 180 hurt at the pillars in the valley of Mina, just outside Makkah.
The worst toll of the pilgrimage was in July 1990,-when 1,426 pilgrims were trampled to death or suffocated in a stampede in a tunnel, also in Mina.
The modernisation plan was announced after Hajj minister Madani told a post-stampede press conference on Sunday that "all the infrastructure and all the deployment preparations cannot prevent thcwillofGod."
But he added that the kingdom would "draw the conclusions to revise the organisation of the pilgrimage and improve" services offered to "the guests of God".
Such projects are not new and at the end of 1991, Saudi government planners approved the building of a controversial residential and shopping center on the site of an Ottoman fort at Makkah.
It was just one of several megaschemes underway to improve the holy city.
The Makkah development plan, to be completed over several years, will enable the area to accommodate more than 1.2 million people, compared with under half a million today.
The plan also envisages an increase in car-parking capacity from today's 585 spaces to a massive 45,000 vehicles, and to expand the pedestrian area from 6,000 square meters to 120,000 square meters.
Traditional souks around the Grand Mosque are today scattered over an area of 180,000 square meters. Ultra-modern malls and markets are planned to cover 660,000 square meters.
One of the major projects is the six-billion-riyal (1.6-billion-dollar) Omar mountain, overlooking the Mosque. Several hundred old buildings are due to be cleared.
Some 120 residential towers, each 20 storeys high, with a total capacity for 100,000 people are planned for the 160,000-square-meter mountain, named after the second Caliph in Islam, Omar bin al-Khattab.
Under another scheme a multitower residential and shopping center
will rise from the site of the old Ajyad Hospital, located on the very edge of the Mosque. A modern hospital will also be built as part of the center.
HAJJ 'A GREAT SUCCESS'
The Hajj season was a "great success" in every possible way, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz said yesterday, adding that the 251 people trampled to death during the stoning of the devil ritual "met their fate".
"I want to congratulate you on your great achievement ... all the security, safety and traffic plans were carried out according to the highest standards and those who say otherwise are ungrateful or hate this country," Prince Nayef told the men charged with the security of the annual pilgrimage to Makkah, the SPA reported.
He said the mostly Asian pilgrims who perished Sunday as they pressed to throw stones at three pillars representing Satan in the valley of Mina near Makkah "met their fate because their place and time of death has been decided the moment they were born."
But despite the fatalism, Nayef said some of the pilgrims who died in the tragedy were partly to blame for losing their cool.
"Our pilgrim brethren should have been, or we would have hoped that they would be, calm and moved slowly to respect those who fainted or fell to the ground dying and not to trample on them," said Nayef, who also heads the Supreme Hajj Council.